A Sound Heart in a Sound Body
As I read the Talmud, a Rabbinic Judaic text, the epigram cited above attracted me to analyse its philosophical facets. Ancient cultures viewed the heart enclosed in the breast as the spiritual centre of human goodness, love, life, and conscience. The breast is also the seat of wisdom. Human goodness brings its own capacity for greater goodness, just as evil gathers eviler momentum. The word for heart in Semitic linguistics carries the sound /l/ as in Hebrew lev, Aramaic l??, and Arabic qalb, not only to reflect the seat of the human intellect but also the heart's prevarication and instability – decision and indecision. Despite its constant symbolic changeability, the heart speaks genuinely from conviction. Human choices are the heart's prerogative. And this explains why we say, in Chichewa, “Musiyeni, ndi zomwe mtima wake wafuna/wasankha”, which translates to ‘Let him/her be, this is what he/she has chosen’.
Not many people have learned to listen to the heart, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23). A person's good or bad deeds emanate from the heart, a piece of flesh that mirrors his or her conduct. The question then is: is the heart the same as the mind? Ultimately, the human's spiritual centre (heart) rules the reasoning centre (mind). In the spiritual realm, the heart and the mind do not function as dichotomies but rather in parallel. Heart and mind are thus closely linked; minus one, the other is incomplete. Self-awareness involves the interconnectedness between the heart and mind. In Western philosophy, the heart, which symbolises emotion, is dichotomized with reason (cognition/head/mind), thereby privileging res cogitans, the thinking mind.
The Talmud text saying that the “best preacher is the heart” means that one should trust one's inner wisdom and conscience above external influences to be guided to the deepest spiritual tenets. Instead of relying on external preachers, the first point of reference for seeking guidance is one's heart. If the heart is good, the whole body and an individual's deeds become good.
The Influence of Time on Human Thought
The first part of Indira Gandhi's saying, “History is the best teacher, but she has no pupils,” aligns with the Talmud, “the best teacher is time.” The last part, “she has no pupils,” means humanity's failure to learn from time's lessons. History is not merely a series of events happening chronologically, but rather the experiences that people go through. The Hebrew and Aramaic word for time is zman. But in broad conceptions of time in Semitic linguistics – Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, for example – the word zaman is used. Within this broad spectrum of time, zaman, a person undergoes firsthand experiences and profound lessons that constitute his/her education; classrooms are inadequate to offer them. The falsehoods and truths in human knowledge and understanding are checked through time, zaman. In this sense, nobody is unschooled or uneducated because time provides contextual experiences that teach them something worthwhile and build patience and resilience.
In the ancient Greek dramaturgy of religion, the word for time, chronos, from which “chronology,” as a sequence of events, is derived, is rooted in the god of linear time, Chronos or Kronos. The pagan Arabs worshipped Dahr, the god of time from eternity to eternity. Time has been treated and personified as a deity in various world cultures. The days of the week correspond to planets, gods, or goddesses in ancient mythology, calculated on a twenty-four-hour basis:
Each day of the week, named for a ruling deity in ancient mythology.
Thus, time is relative to human conceptions. Time, however, is the agent of mutability. Humans and non-humans alike are mutable over time. Time is there for humans to organise their work and learn the world's lessons.
The Metaphor of the World as the Best Book
In his Preface to Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson calls William Shakespeare the “poet of nature” for mirroring observational, universalised human life experiences in his plays and sonnets. Various forms of knowledge – metallurgy, geology, anthropology, theology, oceanology, literature, geography, astronomy, hydrology, law, climatology, and philosophy, inter alia – draw from nature. This is the sense in which “the world is the best book.” This is a metaphor for the vastness of life and reality, in which the quest for knowledge is endless. If you have not eaten food cooked by your friend's mother, you would think that your mother is the best cook. This entails that exposure constitutes reading the world, as St. Augustine says, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.”
The skies, celestial bodies, the earth, and its ecological and non-ecological entities are an open book to learn from.
Travelling notwithstanding, wherever an individual is, the world is open to reading its reality. Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, or whatever books one holds in view, do not transcend the world with inclusive knowledge. Human interactions with the human and more-than-human worlds are occasions for learning. Such lessons provide for human growth and understanding. Knowledge rooted in human experience and studying natural phenomena through reading the lines of the world's poetry sinks into the heart, the best preacher. With time, such knowledge constitutes wisdom. As Shakespeare puts it in As You Like It: “All the world's a stage, /And all the men and women merely players;/They have their exits and entrances;/And one man in his time plays many parts” (2.vii). The last line implies the need for versatility rather than being confined to what one thinks one knows. Achebe's protagonist in Arrow of God, Ezeulu, tells his son, Oduche, “The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.” The metaphor of the world's vastness and untapped knowledge permeates different cultures. The world, therefore, provides multiple prisms through which to conceptualise it and, where appropriate, change with the changing knowledge and times. Habib observes that in the present world order, we need to read critically the “various documents, cultural, political, and religious, which furnish our identity, which tell us who we are, who we should be, and what we might become” (1).
Confinement does not help to open the heart and the mind to the broader world so that, with the passage of time, we enrich our knowledge.
God as the Best Friend
The fickleness or vacillation of human friendships necessitates that God's constancy is critical in soothing shattered hearts. Proverbs 18:24 indicates that “A man of many friends may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” Exegesis informs us that the “friend who sticks closer than a brother” here is God. The many friends that a man or woman has are merely agents of moral, health, economic, spiritual, and physical destruction. Quran 50:16 specifies that “Indeed, it is We who created humankind and fully know what their souls whisper to them, and We are closer to them than their jugular vein.” Deoxygenated blood from the head and brain returns to the heart via the jugular vein in the neck. God is closer to the person as a friend than this vein. Although it is not physical closeness of God to the person, it implies omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. This closeness implies that humans should desist from committing acts that this friend says must be avoided.
Conclusion
Human reason and science are inadequate to explain the world's mysteries and untie cosmic knowledge. The Talmud text, “The best preacher is the heart; the best teacher is time; the best book is the world; the best friend is God,” is loaded with wisdom worth pondering. When Hamlet, in Shakespeare's Hamlet, fails to conceptualise the mystery of his late father's ghost, he tells Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.v. 167–8). Human knowledge and the whole gamut of philosophy and sciences constitute merely a drop in the ocean of knowledge. In Neoplatonic philosophy, humans are pilgrims on earth, and they go to heaven in soul; therefore, it is apt that “the best friend is God.”
